A note to my mum this Mother's Day

My mum spent the weekend painting the kitchen.

She didn’t ask for much on Mother’s Day. Just a pot of paint and a phone call and we thought it best not to argue with her when she’s somewhere in the middle of a home improvement project. It’s the least us three kids could do after all these years.

But here’s the thing: nothing we do for our mothers will ever really be enough. Not because they demand it, but because the sum total of all our breathing moments cannot set right the sacrifices they have made in their own lives.

It was Tenneva Jordan who said: “A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.”

Mum was always saying how little she cared for pie. Or new clothes. Or a new dining table. She’s been a mother for 27 years and it has been a saga of compromise and doubt and going without.

We never did go without, of course. Her non-stop crusade of cutbacks only ever applied to herself so that her children might be afforded the same opportunities as other kids more privileged than us.

She’s a prodigious budgeter, but not even her devastating eye for detail in making savings around the house could give us everything we wanted for in terms of material possessions. Not all our clothes were brand name. Sometimes we didn’t get the new toy or the new video game. We didn’t go see all the movies we wanted.

No doubt this hurt her. No doubt she worried ‘did I do enough’?

Well, Mum, you did more than enough.

History is littered with the stories of children who had all the things money could buy but whom never enjoyed the true, constant, supercharged love of a mother who was proud of the children she helped raise.

I would have traded every game, book, piece of clothing, computer and possession if it meant I could secure that kind of person in my life. But I don’t need to, because I have you, Mum.

You’ve given each of us something beyond value. Yourself, our eternal advocate. But I’ll speak for myself.

You taught me to read and pushed me down the steep, steep slope of curiosity that would set me on my present course. I can’t stop this ride now and I don’t want to.

You taught me the ecstasy of my words and that they might be wielded to share our stories, help our friends and further our causes. You did that. You lit the fuse so that the rest of my days could be filled with this chaotic explosion of meaning and detail and wonder.

You loved me when others (probably quite sensibly) wouldn’t and you continued to be your quirky, oddball, silly self so that I might continue to mine the vast wealth of your escapades for my own tales.

So, no, the phone call and paint probably wasn’t enough of a thank you. So take these, my words, as my gift to you. It’s only right I returned them after all these years.

I remain, forever and always, impossibly in your debt.

Of mice and (wo)men

"Thank you." - All Mice in Our Home

Boonah is in the throes of a mice plague, of sorts. More specifically, the family home in Boonah has come under tiny attack. Which is unfortunate because my family has concurrently developed a code of conduct for dealing with all animals, including pests, that includes not, you know, hurting them.

Gone are the spring-loaded mouse traps that snap viciously. This is as much for the fact they seem inhumane (insofar as inhumanity applies to dealing with mice) as it was for the fact they were manifestly inefficient. They just didn't catch anything, save for the odd human finger which wandered waywardly on to the mechanism.

And so here we are with a new mouse-trap. A small cage with a one-way funnel which lures the mice in but doesn't let them leave, like an early morning infomercial for knives which can cut through several layers of titanium and the hide of an 80-year-old Gold Coast socialite who has spent too long in the sun.

Do you see the problem? Ah, yes, Mr Miyagi. The mice are caught, true, but they're still alive. Which means my mother and sister are now the Chief Operating Officers of a rather elaborate catch and release program, which doesn't really do much for the mice problem which started all this. You don't get rid of the mice, you just make them very late for something.

I inquired as to the effectiveness of the program.

"How do you know where the mice go, once you release them? How do you know they just don't come right back?" I asked. It was a decent question because we have been catching so many.

Mum was ever wedded to the scientific method in her response.

"Well, I make sure we release them in the corner of the yard, facing the neighbour's place. They run that direction."

I stared unblinkingly into her soul for several seconds.

"Mum, have the geneticists engineered mice that only run in one direction now?"

There was an awkward silence. I presumed I had won.

But my mother doesn't like to lose an argument based on silly theories. She would demand empirical evidence. Hard data. She would rig the experiment to prove we didn't have any re-runs. That's what we were calling the possibility of returned mice. Re-runs.

She started painting the tails of the mice we caught. You think I'm joking? I am not. I presume she ran out of microchips and scanners so mum just started dabbing their tails in paint, on account of the fact we'll know if we get any re-runs.

And now we wait. It's been a day now and we've got nought but originals.

I don't know who the real winner is here, but I think it's the mice.

Fighting. I do not get it.

How to not be very good at living.

I've been in a fight once.

More to the point, a fight broke out which included me but which did not draw my participation. To make a shorter point, I was once punched in the face by a drug addled man holding a razor blade. My other point is this: I don't fight.

The desire to fight (other people, other animals) has no more struck me than the desire to wrap myself in barbed wire and roll down a hill. I don't quite understand it. When nature was handing out primal, survival instincts to the hunter-gatherers, I was off picking berries in a skirt. I assume.

It's the part of nature documentaries (when the elk lock antlers and the billy goats huff) that I've always wanted to amend. Sure, nature puts on a stunning show from time to time but I can never help the overwhelming feeling I get when I see two bucks lock horns: guys, have a cup of tea and let's talk this one out. You're giving me a startling headache.

I was out on the weekend with a friend of mine who radiates masculinity so obnoxiously that ovaries wilt within several paces of him. His pheromones have been known to start sputtering V8 engines. He looks like he's spent the greater part of the last decade living on his own in the woods making rudimentary game traps and hassling bears.

Another man brushed past him. It was a little rough, granted, and I was more or less very drunk so my memory is fuzzy, but it didn't seem that bad. If it were me I would have - at the absolute most - shot the man a dirty look and schemed about how I hope he one day gets his foot caught in a railway sleeper.

But it was like a switch had been flicked. Harry, my manly friend, said a few words which essentially translated to 'hey you, sir, let one have a go at you if you deem yourself worthy'. Which is an odd thing to say. Also, he said it with more swear words.

The only thing stopping this mutually assured destruction (and that seems to be what male fights amount to) was a female friend who is about the size of a wild fig. Dainty, she may be, but delicate she is not. She placed herself firmly between aggressor and friend and poked him in the chest. "Just keep walking. Just keep walking."

The confused man was confused. He attempted to circle around her to get to my friend, but she moved too quickly and poked him again. "Just keep walking." And you could see it in his face, this rivalry between his ancient circuits: do not hit the girl, must hit the boy because other girls are looking.

The poor chap almost shutdown, racked with an almost amusing surplus of indecision.

In the wild, of course, female species almost seem to be in a state of de facto approval, if only by their lack of action to intervene in any meaningful sense. Meanwhile, the males fight on. To the death. In many cases.

The whole idea that sorting out a problem with a battle in which one of you may die, and possibly both of you, seems so drastically counter-intuitive. It has admittedly comedic implications in a modern sense (imagine if this were how council disputes were settled! I wouldn't ever have the fence align to the boundaries I want it to, but at least I'd be alive to eat cake and stuff) but decidedly daft ones in the animal kingdom or an individual human sense where walking away seems like such a stunning option.

Pride, after all, can be replenished. Massive head trauma, not always so.

Former Rick, you were an unmitigated tosser

This.

Hey, 14-year-old Rick, you're an uncompromising idiot.

So it turns out my Hotmail email address which I created when I was 14 years old has been hacked. I'm not at all surprised that my Hotmail email was hacked. I am surprised, however, that it took a decade. Seriously, having a hotmail email address is like driving an unlockable car through a Safari park covered in meat.

The password has been changed, you see. This saddens me so. I'd very much like to get in there and tinker with it except 14-year-old me was a supreme fuckwit who set the 'reset' personal question to something that really isn't that personal.

Seriously. Younger Rick wants Current Rick to know the answer to 'a Certain German toy'.

You sick fuck!

Now, let's unravel the details here. I was studying German. I did not, however, have an illicit collection of dildos or paraphernalia of questionable Germanic origin. I may have had a plush toy collected from my school trip to Germany but there is no way in hell I'm going to remember it a decade later when I can't even remember my PIN number on a the debit card I use every day.

That password reset question is like a Horcrux in which I have stored a little piece of my twisted, 14-year-old self.

Why couldn't I have chosen a regular one like 'what is your mother's maiden name' or 'why are you such a ridiculous numpty'?

It's not like I even use the email anymore. I haven't in about seven years. But I used to like going in once a year - like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Spam - to rummage around and see what utter crap I used to email my friends about in 2001.

14-year-old Rick: you are a know-it-all little prick. Oh, I know, let's make up a question that has scant relevance to the real world because I'm 14 and it won't matter because my mind is supple and unravaged by the slings and arrows of insobriety.

I wanted to read those emails you crafty loser. Now how am I going to know in precisely which order I used emoticons when emailing the boys in class who I secretly liked but was too ashamed to tell?

That rose emoticon was a deadly weapon of unrequited digital lust. And now my wanton use of it has been lost forever because you were a dick.

Well, 14-year-old self, I'm going to hand it to you straight.

In the next ten years you are going to sink into a pothole of miscellaneous debt, drop out of university, be involved in an excruciating 'coming out' process and be implicated in the death of your cockatiel.

Yeah, who's the winner now!

Wait.

This sucked.

I'm not a builder. I don't have the brain for it. Which explains why I was more than hesitant when Nat from the office convinced me to enter a miniature Dyson vacuum cleaner model building contest.

CAPTION: Here I am. Preferring to be shot out of a cannon and into the fucking sun.

Yes. You read that correctly. That has 'utter disaster' written all over it.

We were at the Text100Aus Christmas in August tech and gadget trade show, being absolute nerds. And Dyson were there. Now, I like Dyson because one day I plan on buying several of those crazy air mutlipliers (fancy fans) and then traveling back in time to show them to simple folk so that I might become the 1600s equivalent of Storm from X-Men.CAPTION: This is a Dyson air multiplier. It has come for your family.

They had a competition to see who could build one of their miniatures in the fastest time. Which is all well and good if you are a.) an engineer, b.) MacGuyver or c.) some kind of mechanical savant.

I am none of these things. Allow me to explain why.

I won the dubious award in Year Eight metal work of creating the first copper 'spoon' that possessed none of the concave qualities that allowed it to even function as a spoon. My woodwork attempt at fashioning a car-plug-in portable light in a base of wood produced an abomination of twisted metal and timber.

I was the kid who couldn't put his Kinder Surprise together. I hated Kinder Surprises because they were not a 'reward'. They were a tiny, tiny egg of doom.

The teeny weeny vacuum cleany competition was a race. It had to be. The fastest got to take home an actual version of whichever machine you were building. And there is nothing I love more than free things, particularly in light of my so-far-longstanding commitment to never spend a dollar on anything domestic.

But the competition involved pretty much everything I hate. Tiny, tiny parts, instructions that looked like they belonged to the Large Hadron Collider and a stopwatch.

I panicked.

I tried to connect a hose to a swivel bit to a plastic bit that looked like a dot. It wasn't even big enough to be described as anything else. It looked like a freaking point in space. As the clock ticked, my fingers began to shake.

A waiter came by to offer canapes. I glared at him. CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT WHAT I AM DOING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SUSTENANCE ITSELF?

Then the spectators came. A pair who wanted to try the competition for themselves. I tried to jokingly explain that I might 'be a while' and they chuckled the hearty chuckle of somebody who didn't think I was serious. No seriously guys, I might be here until they release an iPhone 11.

Nat is exceedingly Gen Y. Younger than me and far more acclimatised to a world of technology and instruction manuals and the general detritus of expectation. She finished with the infuriating nonchalance of somebody who has never done this before, beating the record time for her model.

I wished ill upon her immediately.

I, meanwhile, was trying to attach a vacuum head to something that looked like a test tube and almost in full meltdown mode. I was nowhere near finished and announced I was giving up. The helpful man offered his assistance: "Just attach that to this...".

I shook my head. No. "Just, grab this..." NO. And I began taking it apart in furious shakes so the next two could have a go. It was 6 minutes and 32 seconds.

In the race to stack together a vacuum cleaner model with 20 or so parts, I was a glorious Did Not Finish.

I swiftly grabbed another glass of wine.

The eternal lament of a launderer

The Winter Olympic sport of 'curling' is actually just a lot of bored people on laundry day.


I just spent the last 20 minutes pottering around my bedroom like a loon attempting to curate an outfit in which I could do my laundry which is almost as difficult a task as forging a golden ring in the fiery pits of Mordor.

This happens every week, mind, and each time I realise with a degree of thunderous melodrama that washing day means I have to wash ALL the things and that leaves me with nothing to wear while the laundry does its thing.

So I get all MacGuyver on my stuff and start trying on shirts the size of windsocks, pants where the crotch has fallen out (this is a long and recurring problem I have with pants, like the universe is trying desperately to claw through my trousers and directly to my groin for as yet undisclosed cosmic reasons) and holding pieces of paper and discarded receipts up to my nipples in a daft attempt to see whether they might provide adequate cover in the event I find nothing else to wear.

Anybody could burst through the door and see my laying semi naked on the couch covered in receipts, assuming I was either very lonely or I had made an inaugural attempt to do my own tax and somehow ended up pants-less with a drinking problem, which is highly likely.

The sad thing is, of course, that my laundry is inside my house so it's not like I need to look beautiful or even halfway decent. That's why we have houses, so we can be the absolute distillation of the awfully indecent human beings we are deep down. Admit it.

If the laundry were down the street and, you know, around people it would all make perfect sense.

But sitting around at home alone in a collage of fabric and old clothes is a bit like Schrodinger's Rick: if nobody can study me I am both gorgeous, immaculately groomed and a disgusting realisation of all that is wrong in the world.

AT THE SAME TIME.

And there you have it, quantum mechanics and sartorial commentary on a Sunday with a hangover.

Or maybe I'm still drunk?

Census (and statistical sensibilities)

I think the people who come up with the Census every five years miss some serious golden opportunities. I mean, this is a stocktake of our nation's collective conscience for crying out loud and still, no questions on 'who would win out of Batman and Wolverine in a death cage fight to the death with lots of dying'.

Poor form. Form pun intended. Kapow.

This is a missed opportunity because there will be no news reports that go like this: "In five years, Australians have switched allegiances from cute ducks to llamas with emotive combovers when polled in the Census about their favourite animals."

There could be fascinating vox pops with demographers about what sparked the sudden switch (an increase of llamas in the media after one accidentally stopped a Middle Eastern conflict by slipping on a stone and winning a Nobel Peace prize) and lots of collective pontificating about the whys and wherefores of our animal votes.

For every 10 'boring' questions there could be a bonus question.

Q 23: What's your income?

Q 24: How many people in your home?

Q 25: Cake or death?

And so on.

But we're a nation who, despite our rough hewn exteriors and crocodile love bites, just loves to fill in a form. We'll pretend to hiss and huff about it but deep down in our British-stock cores we'll be thrilling at the sheer sense of order of it all.

What is it that is so therapeutic about ticking a box? It's roughly equivalent in its calming effect to laying down in a field of daffodils and reading poetry. Personally, I love lining the letters up in the little boxes with swift strokes from an inky pen.

Oh course, if the ink dribbles outside one of those lines I suffer a rage stroke and lament the crumbling fabric of society itself.

We settle many of our national disputes with the cunning use of forms. And the statistics they create.

I don't watch the cricket for the game, necessarily. But give me a run-rate required any day of the week and touching myself slowly to the tune of a slow clap will seem like a distinctly charming idea.

Percentages? Take me now against the wall!

Now, where's my Census?